Online advertising has vastly grown since the development of the Internet. We are all familiar with the advertisements placed in advertisement solution providers like Google and Yahoo, or companies focusing on similar solutions like AdBrite and Federated Media.
The goal of these online advertisement solution providers is to find advertising opportunities for companies and their marketing campaigns. Companies describe their advertisement project in a format provided by the advertisement solution provider. This is typically accomplished with a set of keywords or phrases indicating the type of product or service they would like to advertise. Furthermore, companies can also indicate socio-demographic information or the type of audience they would like to reach (e.g. gender or age group). The socio-demographic information can be matched to information collected by the subscribing web sites through surveys or self documented profiles.
An advertisement could then be placed on a webpage when the solution provider finds a match between the defined advertisement keyword(s) and the information displayed on that webpage. For example, an advertisement can be placed in a web page with search results in Google or in an information webpage of an online newspaper. For the purposes of the present invention the keywords describing the type of product or service is referred to as a what-facet. The information describing the type of audience is referred to as a who-facet.
The what- and who-facet describing an advertisement project works well for general and traditional Internet traffic and websites. Unfortunately, they fall short when an advertiser needs to deliver a message to specific audiences in a specific context that can't be identified by these two facets.
A consumer electronic company could have different advertisements aimed at a diverse group of consumers for example depending on whether it performs an awareness campaign or a loyalty one. For example, different advertisements could be: “buy a new device”, “buy accessories”, “tell a friend”, or “upgrade your memory”. Examples of different advertisement groups could be: “A consumer that already owns an electronic device”, A consumer that does not own an electronic device”, “A consumer who is an experienced user of the electronic device”, or “A new consumer who is a novice user of the electronic device”. It would be either be impossible or at least ambiguous to find one or more keywords defined as what- and who-facets that would trigger an advertising opportunity to target a “novice consumer” for “buying new accessories”.
Similarly, a financial institution desiring to promote new type of mortgage could also have different advertizing aimed at people in different contexts. Examples of advertisement could be a “your dream come true” video ad or a “no fee if you contract this month” text message. These advertisements could be placed on different sites which are talking about mortgage; some being personal diary blogs and others being blogs focused on discussing mortgage in detail. Again it would be impossible or at least ambiguous to find keywords that would trigger the advertising in these different contexts.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art of online advertising to develop new techniques to handle such specific advertising opportunities, especially if one would like to reach an audience in a blogosphere. Blogs are web logs published by people to express their opinion, broadcast a message or chat with other people. Because of this very nature of blogs and their wide diversity comparing to traditional websites an advertiser would need to find new ways to target blogs and their publishers with specific advertisements. The present invention addresses these needs.